Speakers

Craig Hopkins

CIO for City of San Antonio

Craig joined the city’s IT services team in July 2017 with more than 20 years of experience at USAA leading efforts in customer service, digital transformation, corporate strategy, information technology, procurement and innovation.

Building a “Smart” San Antonio, One Experience at a Time

The vision of a smart city decked out with millions of sensors feeding useful information to city officials and citizens is almost out of science fiction. Cities around the world have long-range initiatives to solve for big problems in their communities.

But in most cases, achieving those goals with top-down, technology-driven projects, is the wrong approach. We all may think smart cities is about technology and data, but it’s really about innovating the customer experience first. Once we design the experience we want our residents or visitors to have, we can focus on modernizing the infrastructure. Collecting the data and creating the integrated technical ecosystem.

Learn the vision of SmartSA, what problems we have to solve here, and how the UX community can get involved in gathering ideas and telling stories that improve quality of life for our residents.

Jon Gary Herrera

SVP for Public Engagement at VIA Metro Transit

Jon Gary Herrera is the Senior Vice President of Public Engagement of VIA Metropolitan Transit. VIA provides transportation services to our fast-growing city of San Antonio, identified as the seventh largest city in the United States.

Herrera joined VIA in November 2017 and brought with him a proven history of award-winning strategic and marketing communications, public affairs programs, and government, media and community relations.

He focuses on effectively communicating VIA’s mission of providing multimodal transportation options that connect communities, support economic vitality and enhance the quality of life throughout the region.

Dr. Laura Faulkner

Head of User Experience at Rackspace

Laura Faulkner, Ph.D., is Head of User Experience Research for Rackspace. With over 20 years in user experience, she has served as a Director of Design and Research and a long-time consultant for diverse industries such as health, defense, education, financial services, semiconductor, and public sector.

She received the International Service Award for redesigning the global UXPA international conferences, and is author of the seminal work "Beyond the 5-User Assumption." Laura earned a Ph.D. in research psychology studying HCI (human-computer interaction), following undergraduate degrees in psychology, anthropology, and sociology, while raising four children and wide of array warm, furry creatures with soulful eyes.

Beyond the Five-User Assumption

You have a prototype. You have a beautiful research plan. How can you know if you will have enough users? Is that even the right question? Enter this lively debate from the foundations of our field with one of the pioneers who explored it more deeply and specifically than nearly any before or since. Find out how the conversation has evolved. Learn the science of how a few users can get you what you need. Discover how to know, and how to bargain, when you really do need more.

Susan Price

Lead Experience Strategist at USAA

Susan runs Firecat Studio, a digital strategy agency, and works at USAA as an experience strategist. She uses her deep knowledge and experience to help organizations leverage user/customer centered design techniques and tools to create authentic relationships and thrive in business.

A founder of TEDxSanAntonio and longtime sponsor of coworking spaces and meetups, Susan fosters dialog and champions diversity of opinion. She’s a startup veteran, change agent and community builder who actively works to co-create a better world.

Design Your Clients’ Experience — And Your Career

Use your UX skills to craft experiences that ensure clients get your maximum value — while building a deeply satisfying, rewarding career. These hard-won, practical client management principles help wherever you practice: digital agency, startup, consultancy, freelance, non-profit, government agency or corporation.

Bob Hotard

Lead UX Designer at AT&T

Bob, who recently celebrated 20 years in web design, is a Lead UX Designer at AT&T, where he has worked for the last 16 years. A seasoned digital champion who leads with User Experience, creating and designing experiences that consumers will love. He uses his background in multimedia production and sales management to infuse a great complement of lessons learned and best practices. Bob motivates teams to remain curious and solve problems, while producing experiences that go beyond design.

Come Together Right Now

Bob, also Master of Ceremonies for the day, will kick off the conference with an expertly led, interesting, collaborative dive into the deep end of UI/UX, where we will create definition around the ideas of UI/UX in San Antonio through community collaboration. Be ready!

Cherri Pitts

UX Researcher at UT Health San Antonio

Cherri is UX Researcher for the UT Health San Antonio. This institution has one overall name, but five different prestigious medical and healthcare schools each with their own large website, and an independent employment website. She uses metrics to give status updates and recommendations on changes to the websites using various tracking tools. She loves analyzing the data, connecting the mysterious random dots and meshing that with information gathered from interviews of website visitors. What gets distilled from all that information and asking why enlightens and delights. Letting the evidence tell the story of the user behavior.

CSI-UX: Tracking the User

Get your hands busy and questions ready for this workshop. Cherri will show you how analytics is the method to gather evidence to solve UX crimes. She will share real-world case studies to demonstrate how to follow analytics/evidence.

Michael Verdi

UX Designer at Mozilla

Michael is a Product Designer at Mozilla currently focused on the Firefox search experience. He spends a lot of time watching people use browsers and works at making it easier for them. Prior to his current role, he orchestrated new and updated user onboarding experiences for the last few major Firefox releases. Michael's enjoyed designing experiences for theater, print, video and the web for nearly 30 years.

Orchestrating a Successful Onboarding Strategy

Half of the people who try your site, product or app leave and never come back. Crafting that first impression can make all the difference. It is the best chance you have to get people to see value in what you’re offering. Creating a great onboarding experience is, by its nature, a complicated endeavor. Michael will share practical insights from five years of designing onboarding experiences for 100 million Firefox users. In this session, he’ll help you take a step back and look holistically at what you’re doing. Learn to use research, design and marketing, to hold onto more of your users.

Timothy Porter

Founder and CEO at Appddiction Studio

Porter retired from the U.S. Army as Sergeant First Class. A bomb explosion in Korea took four fingers from his left and two from his right. Porter did not let what others call a disability affect his future. He moved on to tech support, and then taught mobile app development and management information systems at University of Incarnate Word.

Appddiction Studio came to life as a custom software, mobile application development firm. Porter saw the news report that a bullied child committed suicide. Porter reached out to schools after seeing a need and developed Stop Bullies mobile application to help schools combat bullying in real time. Appddiction Studio growth continues in Agile and Enterprise Transformation.

Porter holds an MBA, and he is a Scaled Program Consultant (SPC). He teaches Scrum Master, Product Owner, Leading SAFe and DevOps courses among others. He leads the charge for Appddiction Studio in Agile and Enterprise Transformation.

Competing in the Growth of Agile

Porter shares insights into Agile/Scaled Agile demand in the current market. He is experiencing and recognizing a majority if not all software development projects in the industry having some form of agile/scaled agile requirements. Many Fortune 500 companies including the federal government are moving toward Agile and Scaled Agile Enterprise Transformation. Learn how Agile fundamentals, roles and certification relate to designers, UI/UX design using set-based design techniques versus point-based waterfall techniques.

Porter will discuss Agile/Scaled Agile Frameworks, roles and certifications employers are seeking. He will end by sharing how Appddiction Studio is implementing these practices in the federal government space across multiple Air Force bases in the United States. Porter is a Scaled Program Consultant with Scaled Agile, the leading Industry provider in SAFe Transformations.

St. Mary's MBA Students

Design Thinking

An MBA student from St. Mary’s University will report on the exciting Design Thinking program at the university’s graduate school.